Culture Preview 2026: The best non-fiction to read this year - New Statesman[A] first-class new biography. - Martin Chilton, The IndependentThis is a terrific life of an intriguing poet by one of our great biographers. Peter Ackroyd sensitively explores W. H. Auden's development as a poet, his family, religion (Anglo-Catholic) and relationships. By fleshing out Auden the man, we better understand his verse. One fine writer on another. - Melanie McDonagh, London StandardPeter Ackroyd’s intriguing biography tracks the great poet from his earliest years to his harrowing physical transformation . . . Ackroyd paints Auden as a poet with hawk’s vision and a masochistic streak, full of moral certitude but just as prone to weep at Garbo films or be overtaken by swamps of self-torment. - Declan Ryan, The Daily TelegraphAs Auden wrote in an early poem: ‘A shilling life will give you all the facts.’ In fairness, Auden does a bit more than that. Ackroyd is good at giving the floor to those who actually knew the man . . . Ackroyd makes us feel like we know Auden the man. - Harry Cochrane, The SpectatorThis critical biography of poet W.H. Auden analyzes his work in the context of his intellectual promiscuity and experiences as a gay man living in the repressive early twentieth century. - Publishers Weekly[An] emotionally intimate, sexually frank biography . . . What is most astonishing in Ackroyd’s brisk, persuasive account is the gulf—and, eventually, chasm—between the discipline and virtuosity of Auden’s verses and his increasingly dissolute and unhappy personal life . . . Ackroyd is admiring of Auden’s poetic accomplishment, from his recondite early work to the later, more conversational and religiously inspired verses that some critics have disliked . . . Sometimes biographers work at a remove from their subjects. Not so Ackroyd. Skillfully collating the accounts of Auden’s intimates, he offers details about the poet’s sexuality, psyche, cratering appearance and deteriorating habits that are painful to contemplate. They make one (almost) want to turn away—or seek solace in the poetry. - Julia M. Klein, Wall Street JournalAckroyd's new life of Auden, who was born in York in 1907 and died in Vienna in 1973, neatly weaves together biographical detail with literary commentary . . . Ackroyd provides a well-rounded biography that gets to the heart of the man without confining him to a role in literary or political history, and only occasionally lets his personal judgements show – and some of them are bold . . . But the facts of the poet’s life are poetic: Auden lived a tragicomedy, sometimes by design. Ackroyd gives us an eminently readable new biography that is, from start to finish, both frequently funny and profoundly sad. - Jane Cooper, New StatesmanA brilliant new biography . . . If you have been intimidated by the figure of Auden, then I would highly recommend Ackroyd’s very readable and vibrant account of his life and work. Done well, literary biography is one of my favourite genres, but there is always the risk it will be exhaustive, hagiographic or dry as dust. One of Ackroyd’s great gifts is that he understands that the life experiences that inspire poetry are often mysterious and metaphorical . . . It is also a biography that tries to avoid moral judgement, with a breezy, neutral tone that lets us decide for ourselves what we think of this complex man . . . Ackroyd has done a wonderful job. - Clare Pollard, The IdlerPeter Ackroyd is just the latest in a long line of scholars , writers , poets and biographers who have tried their best to do justice to the quintessential Double – or make that the Triple, Quadruple, Mega-Multi – Man . . . Ackroyd has a strong claim to being the world's most professional and hardest-working, if not actually greatest, living biographer . . . Auden's uniqueness – the enduring appeal, the continuing disturbance, the reason we read him now – lies in his deeply unsettling combination of intimacy and authority, and the sense that you never quite know what’s coming next . . . Ackroyd certainly ticks everything necessary off the Auden biographer’s list. - Ian Sansom, Times Literary SupplementIn Peter Ackroyd, Auden has an estimable biographer whose own career stands comparison with the poet's for industry and commitment to his art . . . This biography makes the case for revisiting all his work and not just the fragments that have endured in popular culture . . . We cannot easily define him, but nor can we escape him. For all the seeming impossibility of the task it has set itself, this book succeeds as a portrait. - Peter Williams, ProspectFor a poet of such stature, WH Auden has been comparatively ill-served by biographers . . . Step forward, then, Peter Ackroyd, writer of many indispensable literary biographies: notably of TS.Eliot, William Blake and Charles Dickens. In this fine life of the poet who, perhaps more than any other, defined the literary aesthetic of England between the wars, he offers a new standard work . . . Ackroyd is excellent on Auden's creative development: his lifelong quest for a voice with which he was happy, rooted in a rigorous attention to metre, a debt to homily, a love of Old English culture and a fascination with music, language and their interconnection . . . Auden, in spite of his gifts (or because of them), was never truly happy. But he has, more than half a century after his death, finally found a biographer worthy of his life and work. - Matthew d'Ancona, The New WorldPeter Ackroyd, the celebrated biographer of T.S. Eliot, has now turned his attention to Eliot’s great successor as an Anglo-American poet. Auden is an eminently readable and well-paced account, rich in anecdote, sympathetically following the man all the way from prodigious youth to senior man of letters. - Seamus Perry, Fellow of Balliol College and Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford
